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DESPITE taking record-breaking profits of £758 million in 2021 and paying £547m to shareholders, Royal Mail’s incompetent management wants to cut services and tens of thousands of jobs in their efforts to run down and asset-strip our postal service and diminish the value of postal workers’ jobs.
As Ian Lavery pointed out to Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson during the BEIS select committee this week, to not even think about rewarding those who provided the profit and instead immediately dole it out to shareholders, is extraordinary.
The board is set on turning a beloved national institution into a gig-economy-style parcel courier, complete with self-employed workers carrying tracker devices instructing them to go further and faster.
Royal Mail is vital for our communities, for small and large businesses, and for our economy. As CWU general secretary Dave Ward told the committee, we’re in a fight for its future — for the future of every postal worker’s job, their terms, conditions and pay, and for the services Royal Mail provides to the public.
These include the universal service obligation (USO), which guarantees a six-day-week, one price goes anywhere, and delivery service, which is important to all of us.
Our posties are a lifeline to rural communities and the elderly. During the pandemic, they were sometimes the only daily contact those living alone had.
Yet Royal Mail has now written twice to ministers arguing for cutting deliveries to a five-day-a-week service. They’ve also written to and met with me — and were still lobbying me for the change just before my parliamentary debate on the issue.
I worked for Royal Mail for 25 years before being elected to Parliament. It was a huge part of my life.
I joined the CWU’s predecessor the UCW on my first day on the job and I was involved in countless negotiations and meetings with the many CEOs I saw come and go (all with millions of pounds in pay-outs and pockets bulging with shares) on pensions, pay, terms and conditions and working practices.
This is why I was so proud, though certainly not pleased, to lead the Westminster Hall debate last week on the future of Royal Mail and to defend its loyal workforce.
I demanded an investigation into the gross mismanagement by Thompson and called on ministers to take action to secure the future of the vital service as it is.
Just weeks after posting those eye-watering profits, Royal Mail announced significant losses, with management claiming they were losing over £1m per day.
Thompson is a CEO with no experience in logistics who, instead of negotiating with trade unions and planning for the future of the business, appears hell-bent on inflaming industrial relations and destroying the USO in the process.
He is insisting on a confrontational row with staff and their unions — threatening to sack workers for taking legitimate action — and deliberately mismanaging our postal services to undermine them.
He’s been criticised by his predecessor as being too confrontational. But when select committee chair Darren Jones asked him, during a car crash of an appearance before MPs, why this might be, the laughable response was that it wasn’t “necessary or nice” to make personal criticisms, before going on to justify his approach as necessary to compete in the parcels market.
Ward told the committee that Royal Mail is making the most brutal attack on any group of workers Britain has seen for decades. Thompson wants to replace the existing workforce with a “new model” — self-employed workers in their own vans, stripped of holiday pay, sick pay and pensions.
Whatever he claims, this isn’t about modernisation. The CWU had a change agreement which would have brought in new ways of working. Royal Mail management reneged on it just days after signing the agreement with the union.
Thompson received a £140,000 bonus last year, the calculation of which has changed from being based on revenue, profit and service level delivery to just “shareholder value.”
He reluctantly admitted to Jones that the bonus award criteria had changed, but insisted that his dishing out millions to shareholders rather than investing in the business and its workforce was not driven by it.
At my debate, I asked Kevin Hollinrake, junior minister for enterprise, markets and small business, to condemn Royal Mail’s senior management team’s inflammatory actions. Doing so would go a long way to helping solve the dispute with the CWU. He did not. But then, we know his party’s position on sacking striking workers.
This government does not care about working people, other than restricting more and more of their rights.
Hollinrake did at least confirm the government’s “current” commitment to retaining the six-day service and that the USO remains at the heart of the postal service.
“Currently” is of course worrying — Royal Mail management isn’t going to stop deliberately running down the service to put pressure on the government to change its mind.
It was good to hear every contribution in my debate last week talk about the importance of saving the USO — from Tory MPs in rural constituencies, SNP MPs talking about the importance of the USO in Scotland, and many of my Labour colleagues speaking up for Royal Mail workers.
The only long-term way to save the service and protect jobs and conditions is to take Royal Mail back into public ownership. Labour must, surely, commit to that.
Kate Osborne is MP for Jarrow — follow her on Twitter @KateOsborneMP.
